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Updated: May 18, 2025
The residences at both Ihonatiria and Ossossane had been kept well supplied with food, even better than many of the Indian households. Game was scarce in Huronia, but the fathers had among their engages an expert hunter, Francois Petit-Pre, ever roaming the forest and the shores in search of game to give variety to their table.
The Jesuits were witnesses of this weird ceremony. They saw the naked Indians going about their task in the pit in the glare of torches, like veritable imps of hell. It was a discouraging scene. But a greater trial than the Feast of the Dead was in store for them. By a pestilence, a severe form of dysentery, Ihonatiria was almost denuded of its population.
Ihonatiria, where you first taught his word, is entirely ruined. Then you came here to Ossossane, and we would not listen; so Ossossane is ruined too. This year you have been all through our country, and found scarcely any who would do what God commands; therefore the pestilence is everywhere."
The Jesuits opened in their midst two missions called St. Ignace and St. Joseph. Teanaustayaé was one of the most important villages of the Attignenonghacs. When the village of Ihonatiria ceased to exist, the Jesuits called it St. Joseph. Here perished, in 1648, Father Daniel, together with seven hundred Hurons. Toanché was another village of the same tribe.
The crops were withering under a severe drought, a calamity which the sandy nature of the soil made doubly serious. The sorcerers put forth their utmost power, and, from the tops of the houses, yelled incessant invocations to the spirits. All was in vain; the pitiless sky was cloudless. There was thunder in the east and thunder in the west; but over Ihonatiria all was serene.
For a year after the establishing of the mission of La Conception at Ossossane three fathers Pierre Chastelain, Pierre Pijart, and Isaac Jogues ministered to the remnant of the Hurons at Ihonatiria. But the pest was still raging, and by the spring of 1638 Ihonatiria was little more than a village of empty wigwams.
Daniel and Davost arrived during the month, emaciated and exhausted, but rejoicing. The missionaries found shelter in the spacious cabin of a hospitable Huron, Awandoay, where they remained until the 19th of September. Meanwhile they had selected the village of Ihonatiria, a short distance away near the northern extremity of the peninsula, as a centre for the mission.
He brought with him Fathers Massé and Jean de Brébeuf, and their arrival was the dawn of a brighter era for the Canadian missions. The Jesuits founded, during the same year, a mission at Three Rivers, and another at Ihonatiria in the Huron country.
As the town of Ihonatiria, where the Jesuits had made their first abode, was ruined by the pestilence, the mission established there, and known by the name of St. Joseph, was removed, in the summer of 1638, to Teanaustaye, a large town at the foot of a range of hills near the southern borders of the Huron territory.
Here was celebrated the great "Feast of the Dead," in the eyes of the Hurons, their most solemn and important ceremonial. In the spring of 1636, the chiefs and elders of the Nation of the Bear the principal nation of the Confederacy, and that to which Ihonatiria belonged assembled in a general council, to prepare for the great solemnity. There was an unwonted spirit of dissension.
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